Phonological and orthographic processing during second language handwritten production of Chinese–English bilinguals

Handwritten production is a complex perceptual-motor process that involves phases of cognitive coding and motor execution. Two core questions in handwritten production concern elucidating the phonological role during orthographic access in the former phase and the effects of linguistic processes on the latter phase. While existing research has investigated these mechanisms in native language (L1), significant gaps persist regarding their operation in the second language (L2), as well as the potential influence of L1 handwriting experience and the modulating role of L2 proficiency on these processes. Here, we conducted three experiments with the picture-word interference paradigm, in which 44 proficient (Experiment 1) and 43 non-proficient Chinese–English bilinguals (Experiment 2), who had learned English as L2, as well as 38 native English speakers (Experiment 3), were required to write down the English names of pictures while attempting to ignore the written distractor word. The distractor word was either orthographically highly related (near-bear), phonologically highly related (chair-bear), or unrelated (cloud-bear) to the picture name (e.g., bear). The response times for the cognitive coding phase and the whole response duration for the motor execution phase were recorded. The conjoint analysis indicated that the differences observed across the experiments were marginally significant. The overall results suggested that in the cognitive coding phase, the activation of orthography was earlier than that of phonology for both proficient and non-proficient bilinguals, which might be dissimilar to the pattern of native English speakers, whose orthography and phonology were activated simultaneously, potentially supporting the influence of L1 handwriting experience on L2 orthographic access. In the motor execution phase, phonological and orthographic processes might be modulated by L2 proficiency: for proficient bilinguals, phonological and orthographic processes were terminated before motor execution, similar to native English speakers, supporting the serial model, whereas for non-proficient bilinguals, linguistic processes could spread into the motor execution, tending to a unique cascade pattern. The results are discussed from the perspective of the assimilation and accommodation hypothesis of L2 processing, as well as the dynamic relationship between the classic models of handwritten production.